Observations on politics, news, culture and humor

Wrong solution, wrong method

AlterNet’s Tara Lohan reports on Virginia governor Bob McDonnell’s decision to overturn a ban on state agencies buying bottled water except for emergency or health purposes. Why did McDonnell do it? Lohan, quoting the AP:

But McDonnell scrubbed Kaine’s plastic-water-bottle ban, which he thought would harm state bottled-water manufacturers. It’s unclear what financial impact, if any, the ban had on such companies.

Wow. There’s dumb reasons to do something and then there’s Bob McDonnell’s reason for scrapping the bottled water ban.

Let’s play out his “logic” to its extreme. Pretend that states buy blood for hospitals. Pretend that some blood banks knowingly supply HIV-infected blood. Now pretend HIV-infected blood purchases are banned for Virginia hospitals. Now pretend that the Virginia HIV-infected blood bank lobby approaches McDonnell and says the ban is hurting their business. By his “logic,” he would have to throw open the hospitals to HIV-infected blood.

Clearly, bottled water and HIV-infected blood are thousands of orders of magnitude away from each other in terms of their negative impact on society. This fact doesn’t make McDonnell’s “reasoning” any better.

Unfortunately for readers, Lohan’s logic isn’t much better since she basically argues McDonnell is wrong because a nationwide survey suggests many cities are taking action against bottled water and Virginia will no longer be in the vanguard of the movement.